


Disjointed Memories

by PenUltimate



Series: Haunting Ourselves [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 09:19:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6278740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenUltimate/pseuds/PenUltimate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>"True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories." – Florence King</em>
  <em>
    <em></em>
  </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disjointed Memories

 

He doesn't have many memories.

 

The few that he does have seem mismatched and patchy. Confusing, muffled, muddled. Blurry.

 

The feel of lips, thin and cracked against his own. He's not sure how he knows that they're lips, but he does. Just as he knows that the feather-light hair, that his hands tingle with from once being tangled in, is blonde – even though he can't quite remember what it looks like. Looked like.

 

Blood. Lots of blood. Blood on his hands, on a knife, staining his skin, his clothes. Blood spurting from an artery, pouring from a vein, dribbling from a shallow wound, pooling on the ground, drying in the sun. A river of red. He knows the different colours, which shade will come from which place. His blood, other people's blood. He can smell it, the stale heaviness of it, like the back of your throat after you drink something sour. Knows the sticky-wet texture of it as it hardens beneath his fingernails.

 

He sees the sharp curve of an elbow, the outline of someone's ribs, jutting out under pale skin – and he feels the sting of worry, although he's not sure why.

 

The tangy taste of hard candy, bittersweet on his tongue.

 

There are hands. Hands he can almost feel drift across his skin sometimes, like a ghost in the night. It's as if they've run across the plains and landscapes of his corpse so often that they've branded his very soul, and he can't shake them.

 

Pain. He remembers feeling every kind of pain he could ever imagine to inflict – has inflicted – on another, in his own body. Every bone that could break, every inch of skin that could be burned, cut, bruised. He knows hunger – starvation – and unbelievable thirst. He knows agony like an old friend.

 

The scrape of pencil against paper lingers in his mind, a comforting sound, even though he has nothing to associate it with. It drifts over him as he's falling asleep, like fog across a bay, like the faded lullaby he can only sometimes faintly hear a woman singing.

 

He wakes up from dreams expecting a warm body to be tangled up in his. Expecting the soft scrape of stubble across his skin. He wakes up feeling cold and hollow. His fist clenched around nothing, where he thought it had been curled up in someone else's cotton clothes. The space beside him, _where there should be a person_ , empty. He wakes up feeling like there's something missing. He wakes up feeling _wrong_.

 

He remembers training, but that's dull and monotonous. Drills he's gone through a thousand times, laps, punching bags, target practise, sparring. It's repetitive and of little to no interest to him anymore.

 

There are half bitten sentences that ring through his head when he hears certain words, certain phrases. Not the begging and screaming in his nightmares – though that happens in the day time too. People asking him not to hurt them, _please, please_ don't hurt them. _That_ he's used to; although, usually, they never see him coming. But there are different voices that echo in his head. Sometimes the words are sung, sometimes they're soft, sometimes they're angry. Some of them are sad, others filled with laughter. Occasionally, it's in his own voice, but more often it's not. From time to time, people begin to speak to him and the end of whatever they're saying gets drowned out by different voices in his mind. Every once in a while, the words come from nowhere, filtering into his consciousness, whispers from missing memories.

 

“Just keep– ,” _smiling. You know that makes me feel better. I love your smile._

 

_Darling, I'm sorry. Look at me, sweetheart, please._

 

“Why, aren't you– ,” _the cutest little thing. C'mere._

 

_You'd be so nice to come home to..._

 

“No need to– ,” _flip your wig. I'm going, I'm going, I'm gone._

 

“Hi– ,” _de-ho, beautiful. What're you drawing there?_

 

_You march, you march, you march._

 

“Now, I know– ,” _you're scared, but I'll be fine, you'll see. I always am._

 

_I'll be seeing you._

 

“You're really– ,” _something, a real piece of work, you know that?_

 

_What I wouldn't do for some real chocolate right about now. These D rations are somethin' awful._

 

“Pennies – ,” _from heaven, that's what this is._

 

Every now and again, he'll react to something in a way he doesn't rightly understand. He'll flinch at the sound of an airplane overhead, shudder at the sight of crackling electricity, pause at the sound of a metallic click.

 

 _Steve_. The man on the bridge. He almost remembers him. Almost, but not quite. It's – his face, it seems vaguely familiar, and it makes him feel curious. But it's his voice that really does it. That voice has haunted his dreams. He knows what that voice sounds like when it laughs, he just doesn't know _how_. He has no idea where he learned that sound, but he thinks it might just be the most comforting thing he's ever heard.

 

Not that he can be sure. He isn't really sure of anything these days.

 

 _Bucky,_ he'd called him. That... makes his head hurt, makes his chest feel tight, his breath coming quick and scared.

 

Most important is that it makes him feel at all. He's not used to feeling things.

 

But there is one other thing.

 

A hungry, all-consuming kind of feeling. It's warmth and light and longing. Protective and urgent, gentle and overwhelming. It rushes over him like the roar of a train over tracks that run above the heads of passers-by. It swells up inside of him like the jazzy tunes that cascade across his thoughts. It wants and it needs and it's a gaping hole inside of him that he doesn't know how to fill.

 

This is what Bucky remembers most. This is the thing that hurts most to remember.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This whole ficlet is really just feels, tbh. Loving Stucky atm. Not sure if I'll write any more stuff for this ship, but I had to get this off my chest. ^_^


End file.
